Sharing our stories. Strengthening our communities.

What's New? September 2024

We are excited to announce our 2024-25 cycle of local community-based history documentation and community engagement. This cycle, we are streamlining our efforts to grow, activate, and make accessible stories within our oral history archive. We are focusing on our Community Roots collection and leveraging our theatre company, Brave Practice, to engage themes within these community histories. Below is a sneak preview of our fall season!

• Parter with Interfaith Works on an oral history exhibit for their 50th Anniversary Celebration.
• Launch our fall Community Roots cohort in partnership with Capital City Pride to document local LGBTQIAA2S+ History. Convene and train our cohort of Pride Storytelling Project participants in project development and oral history interviewing.
• Host Workshop #1 in our three-part series - Documenting Ourselves: Oral History For Educators and Community.
• Install our Community Roots exhibit in a new location and host three events, one activating The Liberation Cafe story in collaboration with the Evergreen Civic Engagement Academy, one activating the Driftwood Daycare story using Playback Theatre with Brave Practice, in collaboration with Evergreen’s Children’s Center, and one activating the Camp Quixote story with a community partner group.
• Create an accession plan for our oral history archive with Olympia Timberland Library.
• Brave Practice hosts two performances, one in collaboration with a youth-focused community organization, and one in a classroom or school-based program.

Unfortunately, we've decided not to continue our Creativity Salon series as planned. We recommend folks check out Olympia Lamplighters, Oly Queer Figure Drawing, and Community Print for other similar creative spaces. We feel blessed to have shared this creative space with you in the past and look forward to more capacity to focus on our other oral history programming.

See our Events Page for the most up-to-date published schedule of events, exhibits, and programs. Check back often! You can also follow our Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. A note: most activities this year will take place in public locations within Olympia city limits because Inspire Olympia is our main funding source. We will continue to engage throughout the South Sound and State as capacity allows.

Thanks for joining!

Summer Institute in Oral History for the
Classroom & Community

Thank you to the educators who joined us two weekends ago at our Summer Institute! You've helped us build a foundation to grow as an educational resource and clock-hour provider. Participants gained skills in project development, archival research methods, oral history interviewing, audio recording, and ethical best practices. This group represented middle school teachers across arts, humanities, and sciences, a high school-to-graduation educator, higher education faculty, community leaders and organizers, and an OSD librarian! We LOVED the diversity of perspectives and expertise these professionals brought to the topic of facilitating an ethical, community-based research project using oral history methods. Thank you to our host and home-space, Arbutus Folk School.

Our long-term vision is to make our archival collection accessible in education environments and offer educators the tools to ethically lead community-based cultural documentation projects with their students, families, and communities. Look ahead to our "Documenting Ourselves" workshop series for bite-sized training throughout the year!

Gleaning Wisdom from Our Neighbors
Community Gathering

Thank you to those who joined us for our annual gathering this past weekend. Thank you to Debe Edden who led our community storytelling circle. Thank you to our 2024 Community Honorees, Khurshida Begum of ASHHO Cultural Community Center, and our 2023 Community Roots core project cohort Aidyn Dervaes, Kelsey Smith, and Mindy Chambers. Thank you, Mindy, for being in charge of food, too! Thank you everyone for honoring us and one another with your stories, time, care, wisdom, and resources that support the continuation of our work. We are here doing what we do because of you, dear supporters.

Didn't get a chance to join us at the gathering but still want to contribute?

Donate Now

Thank you to our sponsors: Raffle prizes by Humble Cow Ice Cream, Olympia Film Society, Radiance Apothecary, and Bayview School of Cooking. Food sponsors Olympia Food Co-Op and Tumwater Costco.

Last Chance to Receive 2024 Perks!

Become a Friend of Community Storytelling

We need more community supporters LIKE YOU to continue this work! Subscribing to our Friends of Community Storytelling program is the easiest way to support the community-based oral history and storytelling programming you love.

Our 2024 subscriber incentives are:

• ‍Friends - $5+/ month, $60+/ year: Window Seat Media annual themed pin
• ‍Neighbors - $10+/ month, $120/ year: Community Roots bookmark
• ‍Connectors - $25+/ month, $300/ year: Annual themed tote bag
• ‍Cultivators - $50+/ month, $600/ year: Community Roots letterpress print (design by Aïcha El Beloui)
• ‍Champions - $100+/ month, $1,200+/ year: Group cooking class with Terry Vanderpham and Phamily Cooking aka Nourish Olympia.

AS A THANK YOU - If we reach the following new subscriber goals (yes - current subscribers who raise their level count as 'new'), we will be doing some fun things!

• 5 new subscribers: Meg draws one person at random to receive a personalized keepsake card. You can give me some collage materials and I'll hand-make you an ephemera card with a main image of your choice!
• 10 new subscribers: Elaine draws two people at random to receive one loaf of Vetebrod (Swedish coffee bread), her family's specialty.
• ‍20+ new subscribers: We draw one person at random to receive an hour-long free consultation for your next storytelling or oral history project with Meg and Elaine.

September 30th is the last day to receive the perks connected to the Subscriber Drive. Now is the time to join!

‍Subscribe Now

Your contribution pays directly for the community events, exhibits, workshops, and performances you love! Your money supports not just us, but the numerous collaborators and artists we invest in through our work. Donations allow us to be nimble in our community programming and continue to offer large sliding pricing for our events and services. It’s as simple as $5 a month.

We deeply value your reciprocal relationship in fundraising. Thank you for helping us spark conversation, connection, and social change.

Join us this September with IW

SATURDAY, September 21, 2024
4:00 - 7:00 PM
The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
1601 North Street SE
Olympia, WA 98501

Window Seat is working with Interfaith Works on an oral history exhibit for their 50th Anniversary Celebration! Join IW for a time of storytelling through an interactive audio exhibit celebrating 50 years of Interfaith Works history. Hors d’oeuvres, Desserts, and Beverages will be served. This will be a very fun event!

Event Tickets: $100
Faith/Spiritual Community Leader Event Tickets: $50
BUY TICKETS

Food for Thought
stories, projects, events, and works we love

​Window Seat's mission is to spark conversation, connection, and social change through community oral history and storytelling. Our nonprofit aims to weave the stories that often go unshared into the fabric of our public life. We believe we write our future with the stories we narrate, and we are committed to co-creating a more inclusive, connected, and just world.Window Seat Media is a 501c3 nonprofit organization.Our tax ID# is 81-1200465. Your donation is tax-deductible.